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San Diego, CA and Chicago, IL, March 16, 2007 - Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) came away from the IEEE Virtual Reality 2007 conference this week with two major honors: the Best Paper Award; and IEEE’s Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award.

Nine co-authors shared in the Best Paper prize for their work on a brand-new display technology, called Dynallax, which could one day allow more than one person to roam through the same 3D virtual reality (VR) environment without wearing glasses.

Two of the best-paper authors - Calit2 Director of Visualization Tom DeFanti, and UIC’s Daniel Sandin, who now spends one week a month at Calit2 in San Diego - shared in the VR Technical Achievement Award for their invention of the CAVE® immersive display environment fifteen years ago at UIC’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL).

The IEEE honor recognizes researchers for a “seminal technical achievement in virtual and augmented reality,” and the award was bestowed this week at VR2007 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Sandin accepted the award on behalf of himself and DeFanti, with Carolina Cruz-Neira, their EVL graduate student in the 1990s, who is now executive director and chief scientist at the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise. DeFanti and Sandin co-founded and led EVL, and remain directors there.